Ice Rescue Sparks Antarctic Tourism Debate

Barbara Tucker, a passenger aboard the trapped ship MV Akademik Shokalskiy, looks at an Adelie penguin walking by on the ice off East Antarctica on December 29, 2013.

STRINGER/Reuters/Corbis

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100-Year-OldNegativesRecoveredFromAntarctica:Photos

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Antarctic Heritage Trust conservators recently made a stunning discovery: a box of 22 exposed but unprocessed negatives, frozen in a block of ice for nearly one hundred years.
The negatives were recovered from a corner of a supply hut that British explorer Robert Falcon Scott established to support his doomed expedition to the South Pole from 1910-1913. Scott and his men reached the South Pole but died on the trip home.
The hut was next used by the Ross Sea Party of Sir Ernest Shackleton's 1914-1917 Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition
after they were stranded on Ross Island when their ship, the Aurora, blew out to sea. This party is believed to have left behind the undeveloped negatives.
The cellulose nitrate negatives are seen here as they were found -- frozen in ice.

This recovered image shows Alexander Stevens, the chief scientist and geologist of the Ross Sea Party, on the deck of the Aurora in McMurdo Sound, Antarctica.

Antarctic Heritage Trust, www. nzaht.org

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A view of Tent Island in McMurdo Sound. There is mold damage evident around the edges of the image.

Antarctic Heritage Trust, www. nzaht.org

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This damaged photo shows Big Razorback Island in McMurdo Sound.

Antarctic Heritage Trust, www.nzaht.org

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Alexander Stevens again poses on board the deck of the Aurora.
It was not until January 1917 that the Aurora returned to rescue the Ross Sea Party. By then three men had died, including Arnold Patrick Spencer-Smith, the team's photographer.
To see more images from the recovered negatives, visit the Antarctic Heritage Trust's website .

But, as those aboard the Akademik Shokalskiy found out, blizzards, icebergs and treacherous seas are also a fact of life at one of the most remote locations on Earth, where help is often thousands of kilometres (miles) away.

"It does indeed serve as a reminder that it's an extreme environment that we're dealing with, whether it's scientific expeditions going down there or tourism cruises," Daniela Liggett, a specialist in Antarctic tourism regulation at New Zealand's Canterbury University, told AFP.

Tourist numbers in Antarctica have grown from less than 5,000 in 1990 to about 35,000 a year, according to industry figures. Most travel by sea, some paying in excess of $20,000 for a luxury cabin in the peak period from November to March.

There is also a healthy market for sightseeing flights, despite the loss of an Air New Zealand DC-10 in 1979 which crashed into Mount Erebus, killing all 257 on board.

The first recorded tourist ship was an Argentine vessel, Les Eclaireurs, that made the voyage with 100 paying passengers in 1958.

Since then, concerns have centred on tourists' potential impact on the untamed wilderness and the difficulty rescuers would face reaching a ship if it hit serious trouble in the freezing waters.

"What's unique to the Antarctic is that it's very remote and if something happens to a bigger ship then it will be almost impossible to rescue all the passengers in a timely fashion," Liggett said.

With conventional rescue services so far away, the task of helping stricken vessels often falls to the scientific missions, disrupting their carefully planned research programmes.

French Polar Institute director Yves Frenot was furious last week that French, Chinese and Australian ships in Antarctica were diverted from scientific work for the Shokalskiy rescue.

"There's no reason to place Antarctica off-limits and to keep it just for scientists, but this tourism has to be monitored and regulated so that operators can be sure of getting help if need be," he told AFP.